Another ‘al Qaeda guy’ dies in Afghanistan

On April 27, blogger Michael Yon asked military commanders if they could recall if any “al Qaeda guys” were killed or captured in Afghanistan. Our list, here, names several, as well as some Afghan commanders killed in US airstrikes in Pakistan. And here is another, Abu Dijana San’aani, a Yemeni who served as a bomb maker for al Qaeda.

San’aani death was announced in a statement released on the Internet;

Views from the Occident has the statement, in Arabic. The Google translation is rough, but it appears as if San’aani was killed on May 9 while attempting to carry out an attack in Kabul. According to Evan Kohlmann, San’aani’s friends said he “was allegedly killed when an explosive device that he was building blew up in his face.”

This, from the May 1 LWJ post with the list of al Qaeda operatives and leaders killed in Afghanistan, bears repeating:

That there are few, if any al Qaeda leaders and fighters in Afghanistan is common argument, as seen here and here. What this misses is that, while al Qaeda’s leadership presence in Afghanistan has been diminished due to a marked shift to Pakistan’s tribal areas, the terror group is still quite active in Afghanistan, most notably in the form of embedded trainers and allied organizations like the Haqqani Network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Islamic Jihad Union. Thomas Joscelyn and I documented this interconnectedness between al Qaeda and the Taliban thoroughly back in October 2009.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

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